"I feel that they are in danger of going extinct." Dick Goin wrote that mournful line in his fishing log in the 1980s, and he would spend the rest of his life fighting to bring the salmon back to his beloved Elwha River on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Goin’s family settled by the Elwha after fleeing the Dustbowl, and the river sustained them until its dams destroyed the salmon. The beauty of this film, which won Director’s Award for Cinematography at the Woods Hole Film Festival, is its simplicity. The film is at once an elegy about a lost life an what the river once was, and a bittersweet ode to the resilience of the salmon and one man’s persistence. - Carolyn McMaster